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Nimble News from MS Inspire

MS Inspire, the annual Microsoft partner event, has just ended,
wrapping up a flurry of news and announcements from Microsoft and its channel
partners.

Most announcements were
interesting; some more than others, especially when considering these items
together. I’ve been following Nimble CRM and its founder Jon Ferrara for a while now, so I
was particularly interested in hearing about the launch of its global reseller program and its social relationships
insights add-in for Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook
Desktop/Mobile. Nimble made its announcements within the context of Microsoft’s
increasing its emphasis on partner success, as evinced by its One
Commercial Partnerinitiative to bring together
partner-focused teams from across the company and
its new ISV Cloud Embed services offerings for
partners.

Why is this interesting?

Microsoft’s lifeblood is
its partner ecosystem. In all likelihood, the company has the biggest,
most robust partner channel around. Microsoft basically sets, and resets, the
gold standard with their constantly evolving partner strategies.

A case in point is
Microsoft’s announcement to incentivize its partner-focused teams to sell
3rd party partner solutions with Microsoft first party solutions,
Microsoft is making it even easier for MSP/CSV and ISV partners to leverage
synergies and add value to customers, profits to partners and stickiness to
Microsoft products.

We also see Microsoft’s
Azure co-sell program taking further steps with ISV Cloud Embed. This new
program allows partners to embed Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps, and
Microsoft Flow into their front- and back-office solutions. (I wouldn’t be
surprised if LinkedIn were also integrated into this mix in the near future).
If you think about it, this co-sell program looks a lot like Microsoft’s
embedded Visual Basic for Applications on steroids. Lots of steroids.

Nimble is following an
ecosystem strategy, too. The company has been co-developing its light-weight
social CRM with Microsoft and integrated into the Microsoft stack for
well over a year now. The latter is showcased by the new social insights add-in
for MS Outlook and Office 365, the former by launching its own global
reseller program in combination with becoming a Microsoft Gold ISV Partner.

At the same time. Nimble
stays committed to the Google stack it was originally developed on, therefore
running a two-pronged technology strategy.

My
Take

This is a thing.

As I have written a few times, Microsoft
owns a technology stack that should worry other business application vendors.
Microsoft strives to, and has the potential to, become the fabric that connects
enterprises of all sizes with their stakeholders. In cooperation with its
partners, Microsoft’s reach spans everything from the hardware powering
cloud-based and on-premise data centers to the hardware in the hands of users
and customers.

Microsoft also has the
software to connect the two. After nearly missing the SaaS wave, the
writing's on the wall: Azure will surpass AWS as the infrastructure of choice
for businesses big and small.

From my point of view,
there are only two concerns (three, if you count the possibility of a
major strategic stuff-up, which seems to be highly unlikely):

First, I still do not
see a Microsoft e-commerce platform that has the potential to compete
head-on with the likes of SAP Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Oracle’s
ATG. With the world going more digital almost by the minute, I don’t
understand why this gap remains.

The second concern stems
from the innovator’s dilemma. Microsoft is well on its way to crossing the
chasm, meaning that it is drifting (or has drifted) into the Enterprise market
from Axapta and Navision, the SMB ‘roots’ of Dynamics.

This is where Nimble
comes into the picture. With its strong Microsoft-centric strategy and solid
credibility with small businesses, Nimble opens the door to SMBs adopting
Microsoft’s business applications. Many, if not most, of them are running
Microsoft Office and/or Microsoft Outlook already. Nimble is an easy entry
point into the business applications market, which in turn offers Microsoft and
its partners the opportunity to grow small business customers into the Dynamics
offerings as they grow.

By leveraging
Microsoft’s partnering programs while simultaneously setting up its own
reseller program, Nimble is attempting to create a triple win for
Microsoft, its channel partners and for itself. Given that Jon accomplished
this previously with GoldMine (GoldMine has over 5 Million customers and 5,000
Reseller Partners, and it was Microsoft’s #1 ISV partner in the 90s), I don’t
see any reason why this strategy wouldn’t succeed here as well. .

Nimble’s strategy is
bolstered by its continued support of the Google stack since both Microsoft and
Google are the operating systems of businesses. Google and Google Apps are
especially interesting for smaller businesses.

The only shadow that I
see in this rosy picture is Nimble’s current pricing model. They shed
their free tier a while ago and settled for a $25 per user, per month model.
The free Nimble Social Insights Add-In for Microsoft Outlook and Office 365
alleviates this to some extent. However, the free edition is still limited,
and, considering Nimble addresses the SMB market with a capital S, there is a
sizeable jump from free to $25/month/user. Jon hinted that Nimble will address
this with an upcoming edition of a Nimble Contact Manager for Teams without
advanced features, which will be priced at around $10/month/user.

So, in summary, Nimble
is pursuing a sound strategy here, albeit one with a final question mark:
Amazon. It will be interesting to see what moves Amazon makes in the Cloud
Productivity Platform market over the next years.

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